Paper Abstracts

• FARAH AL-NAKIB  Restoring the Urban Commons: Youth Activism and the Appropriation of Public Space in Kuwait

>In his discussion of the “urban commons” in his recent book Rebel Cities, David Harvey makes an important distinction between public spaces (e.g. streets, sidewalks, squares) and public goods (e.g. sanitation, water, public health, education) on the one hand, and the urban commons on the other. While the former are of course commonly shared, it takes political action on the part of the people, not the state, to appropriate such public spaces or public goods and make them part of “the commons” (Harvey 2012, 72-73). “The common is not to be construed,” he says, “as a particular kind of thing, asset or even social process, but as an unstable and malleable social relation between a particular self-defined social group and those aspects of its actually existing or yet-to-be-created social and/or physical environment deemed crucial to its life and livelihood.” There is, then, a social practice of commoning: a struggle by particular social groups to access, appropriate, and use the public spaces and public goods of the city for a common purpose.
Kuwait provides an interesting lens through which to unpack what exactly the commons is and how it can be created. Although Kuwait’s hydrocarbon resources are considered common property shared by all citizens, the state’s distribution of wealth in the form of goods and services removes oil resources from the realm of the common, along with the urban spaces and social relations produced by oil. Only when public spaces or goods are appropriated by particular social groups through political action does the common emerge. Kuwait today is witnessing an increase in commoning practices and struggles among a new group of urban activists who reflect a growing desire among diverse social groups to recreate an urban commons after more than six decades of privatization, segregation, and citizen estrangement from processes of city formation.

• ASEF BAYAT  Urbanity and Insurrections: Cities of the Arab Spring

> The revolts of the 2010s in the Middle East (e.g. the Green rebellion in Iran, the Arab uprisings, the Gezy protests in Turkey) took place mostly in cities. What does this urban locus of the uprisings in the Middle East (where over 40 percent of the people inhabit ‘rural’ areas) tell us the about the relationship between urbanity and insurrection? What aspects of urbanity make cities the spaces of contention? And why are certain urban sites, streets, or squares conducive for mobilization more than others? I suggest that certain underlying urban paradoxes shape the urban contention. Urbanity generates in the inhabitants certain needs and obligations; yet, it also inculcates certain entitlements and rights. It enforces certain constraints on how to live an urban life; yet, it offers extraordinary opportunities for forging and expressing collective dissent. To illustrate this point, I focus on the cities of Tehran, Cairo, and Tunis in the past decade, but especially during the 2011 uprisings.

• JULIE-ANNE BOUDREAU  Urban Life is Political Life: Ethnographic Reflections on Contemporary Political Action

> In what ways has global urbanization affected the political process? Based on ethnographic vignettes from the student “Maple Spring” of Montreal and from politicized forms of urban political culture in Mexico City, the paper argues that living in an urban world calls for a profound rethinking of how we act politically. The objective is to extend the view of urban politics beyond municipal and metropolitan institutions and beyond organized urban social movements to the broader political process in cities.
The urban is not the city – it is more than just a type of settlement characterized by concentric centrality and density; nor is it an enclosed zone defined by clear boundaries. Rather, the urban is a specific mode of relation to space, time, and affect, marked by mobility, intense interdependence, discontinuous spaces that carry emotional significance, and multiple temporalities. We live in a world where the ‘urban’ has become a common trope just as the ‘global’ was twenty years ago, or the ‘modern’ before that. An urbanized world is a world where specific modes of social, economic, and political relations have been adopted by ever more people living in various types of settlements (cities, suburbs, and villages). This is a world where mobility has become a way of life and where what shapes people spatially is not so much where they live (their residence or their neighborhood) but how they move around and use space (the frequency of passage in certain places) and the ensuing effects this has on their social, political, and economic relations.
Living in an urban world, in short, calls for a profound rethinking of how we act politically and how we engage with our worlds. Is there a specifically urban way of acting politically? I would argue that there is; however, our social scientific tools that were developed in parallel with the rise of the national welfare state over the past seventy years have prevented us from appropriately detecting it. This paper reflects on the political by highlighting the concrete effects of urbanity on engagement, action, and practices.

• THANASSIS CAMBANIS Beirut Madinati and the Limits of People Power

> The reformist movement Beirut Madinati galvanized the electorate with a technocratic campaign to improve life in the city. The movement implicitly attacked the root causes of poor governance in Lebanon, but reflecting a common tactic and limitation of people power movements, Beirut Madinati stopped short of fully embracing a political identity or political critique. Populist movements can harness frustration and appeal to a wide coalition if they tout shared goals for quality of life and common spaces. Beirut Madinati’s trajectory spotlights a persistent problem: coalitions that avoid divisive political questions cannot successfully challenge a corrupt status quo that is both powerful and resilient. A sustained popular movement needs to elicit loyalty around an animating central idea — one with powerful enough claims over identity or ideology to challenge the rallying ideas of the dysfunctional status quo.

• DIMITRIS DALAKOGLOU Infrastructural Gap and the Future of the Cities

> An infrastructural gap (IG) emerged after the outbreak of the crisis in 2008 and it refers to the difficulty of the state and the private sector in sustaining the level of infrastructural networks in the Western world. Yet, infrastructures comprise the realm where the state or the market materialize a great proportion of the social contract. Citizens, therefore, often experience IG as a challenge of the entire political paradigm. Nevertheless, as research in the country that is at the center of the current euro-crisis — Greece — records, we have novel and innovative forms of civil activity focused on the IG. Such activity, applying principles of self-organization and peer-to-peer relationships, along with practices of social solidarity and ideals of commons, attempts to address IG in innovative ways. However, such practices call for theoretical and empirical innovations as well, in order to overcome the social sciences’ traditional understandings of infrastructures.

• ANNA DOMARADZKA Co-creating Urban Alternatives: Grassroots’ Movements as Challengers in the Urban Policy Field

> In the recent years a new kind of urban grassroots movements (Jacobsson 2015) became a global phenomenon that merits the attention of both researchers and theorists. Polish cities in particular are the arena of a new type of civic activism, typically in the form of neighborhood initiatives, which emerge as a reaction to negative changes in the modern urban environment. Drawing from the international inspirations, Polish activists often point to the “right to the city” idea as a paradigm defining their goals and actions. Interestingly, this framework is adapted by very different groups existing within the movement – from squatters who reject the “capitalistic order of space” to inhabitants of gated communities, who want to influence the way their semi-private or semi-public spaces are organized and managed (Polańska 2013, Domaradzka 2014).
Due to an increased media support and successful coalition building, those new grassroots actors gained some level of influence over political decisions and modes of operation of administration on the local as well as the national level. While one can argue that the urban movement is one of the important factors influencing local politics (especially in the last elections in 2014), we should also try to estimate the level of their real impact and go beyond the mere rhetoric. Using the data gathered before (2012 – 2013) and after the recent elections (2015 – 2016), it will be possible to observe the changes in the movement agenda as well as in public administration response.
From a theoretical point of view, the Strategic Actions Fields framework proposed by Fligstein and McAdam (2011, 2012) will be used to analyze the role of the actors within the urban movement as “challengers” in the existing field of Polish urban policy. Also, their part in redefining urban residents as participants of urban planning and decision-making processes will be discussed.

• SORAYA EL-KAHLAOUI Resisting Modernity: Claiming the Right of Housing

> In February 2014, at the heart of a chic neighborhood in Rabat, police forces forcefully destroyed the homes of Douar Ouled Dlim’s inhabitants, members of the Guich Loudaya tribe. Refusing to leave their land, the inhabitants have since lived in makeshift camps made of plastic tarp. In the last 2 years, they held several demonstrations and protests and filed multiple administrative appeals, attempting to claim the right to be relocated.
Nothing is left today of the 400ha of cultivable land historically claimed by the Guich Loudaya tribe. Coveted as a land reserve, their status has been made vulnerable with the arrival of colonial rule that dispossessed the Guich Loudaya tribe from their owner status, by reducing them to simple usufructuaries. Now that the bare ownership has been placed in the hands of the Ministry of Interior, the process of privatizing the lands has been made easier. The Guich lands, which have been relinquished at nominal prices to private developers linked to the ruling elite, have been used since the 1980s to extend the city of Rabat, and particularly to erect one of the poshest neighborhoods in the city: Hay Ryad. The tribal inhabitants found themselves dispossessed of their lands, under-compensated, and relocated to social housing in the outer peripheries. Despite the various struggles that shaped the resistance led by the Guich Loudaya tribe, today their lands have entirely become concrete surface, erasing therefore any trace left of the existence of this peasant community.
Being committed to modernization, Morocco is experiencing a high rate of urbanization, like any other country in the Maghreb. The city, erected as a showcase of modernity, is taking shape under the auspices of international standards that are used as a pretext in order to privatize non-regulated land reserves (i.e. slums and informal or communal habitats such as collective land).
This presentation begins with the example of the privatization of the Guich land in order to show how a modernist rhetoric underpins an extension of colonial logics of grabbing and privatizing communal agricultural spaces. More specifically, based on an ethnography of the inhabitants of Douar Ouled Dlim claiming their right of housing, the presentation aims to analyze the forms of resistance to an urban modernization project.

• SOPHIE GONICK Provincializing Protest: Migrant Women and the Making of Urban Activism in Contemporary Madrid

> Many accounts of global uprisings have looked to their spontaneous qualities and joie de vivre. In such retellings, these movements emerge endogenously, channeling local dynamics outwards, where they might connect with transnational networks of protest. Those analyses that acknowledge embedded internationalisms often highlight the work of flaneur activists. In this way, Porto Alegre comes into proximity with the spectacle of Occupy or the more intimate confines of a Spanish squatted social center. The experiences of male subjects, often white, relatively young, and able bodied, are frequently privileged in these accounts.
Yet, the introduction of postcolonial and feminist gazes into our study of urban social movements perhaps might help us apprehend unseen transnational trespassings. In this presentation, I turn to the anti-evictions movement in contemporary Madrid, Spain, to reveal how urban social movements can be shaped by unassuming processes and actors typically left off the map of our scholarly imagination. Using the concept of provincialization, I interrogate the role of migrant women in forging a particular politics of resistance. Through ethnographic and archival research, I trace how Ecuadorian women, often of indigenous origin, became homeowners during the city’s millennial property boom. Configured as a means of conferring legitimacy and even citizenship, ownership soon proved deadly, as default turned dreams into debt. Yet, against the myriad violence this system engendered, these women were early pioneers of resistance, in part because of the differentiated nature of their experiences. Here, I elaborate how they drew upon indigenous traditions of both collective life and activism to resist their prescribed fate, contributing to the birth of one of Spain’s most successful and enduring movements. This presentation will demonstrate how local struggles that respond to immediate urban conditions are deeply influenced by transnational flows of people and politics. Further, it will re-center race and gender as central variables within the Mediterranean’s urbanism of crisis and contestation.

• MONA HARB Cities and Political Change: How Young Activists in Beirut Bred an Urban Social Movement

> The paper investigates how young activists in Beirut bred an urban social movement. It is organized in two parts: the first discusses the context of urban policies and governance in Beirut and how it has generated a dismal state of public services, where youth groups are excluded from the city and the public sphere. The second examines how two generations of urban activists created a diversity of groups eager to preserve the livability of their city and their shared spaces. Three success stories of young urban activists demonstrate the formation of new modes of collective action and mobilization. The trigger for the consolidation of these modes of action into an urban social movement is the collapse of a key public service – garbage collection and management –which translated into widespread protests (al-Hirak) as well as a successful municipal campaign (Beirut Madinati).

• KAREEM IBRAHIM Urban Activism in Egypt… A Reality Check

> Urban activism around the different aspects of the ‘Right to the City’ has been gaining steam in Egypt, especially over the past two decades. Following the January 2011 events, Egypt started to witness unprecedented mobilization among urbanists, community groups, and academics – all demanding citizens’ urban rights and calling for an alternative urban development paradigm that addresses the deficiencies of Egypt’s past urban planning failures. As top-down urban planning practices – temporarily put on hold over the past 6 years – are re-emerging again, urbanists in Egypt are facing an old/new challenge. Beyond claims for public space and calls for the right to adequate housing, a more structural and challenging endeavor faces Egypt’s urbanists: addressing the escalating urban inequalities and the systematic failures of the Egyptian urban governance framework.
This presentation provides an overview of the efforts of Takween Integrated Community Development – a social enterprise established in 2009 – in working within this context. It demonstrates how Takween has been advocating for better urban policies and practices through direct engagement in urban development practices and through one of its urban research initiatives – TADAMUN: The Cairo Urban Solidarity Initiative implemented in partnership with the American University (Washington D.C.). The presentation also demonstrates how Takween has been addressing issues of community engagement and interacting with urban activism on the local level. And more importantly, the presentation attempts to provide a reality check to investigate the challenges facing the urban activism movement in Egypt through portraying the efforts of Takween and other similar groups within perspective of the state’s urban development policies.

• AZAM KHATAM Rescaling of State and Right to the City Movement in Tehran

> Tehran is witnessing a powerful growth of urban activism despite the rule of conservatives on the municipal administration since 2003. From ‘micro-protectionist’ campaigns to save the architectural and green heritage from private or municipal speculative projects, to challenging the rich and powerful municipal administration- a fruit of the home grown neoliberal decentralization of the 1990s- for its disastrous irregularities in planning practices and failures to provide public services and infrastructures, activists around the city have built an unprecedented movement in a semi-oppressive atmosphere.
This paper will examine the conditions that led to this movement, with a focus on existing links between emerging urban activism claiming right to the city in the legal framework (through monitoring Tehran’s plans, policies, and regulations) and vendors’ politics of “survival by repossession” in the streets of the city and their resistance against the policy of eviction that has been enforced harshly by the municipal police in last two years. I examine how activists in Tehran are using the discourse of the Right to the City to bridge their struggle against fraud and irregularities in the neoliberal Tehran Municipality and campaign for recognition of street vending as a legitimate urbanity. I argue that the process of decentralization in a non-democratic setting like Iran, has led to the reorientation of municipalities from merely managerial authorities to institutions that are both the field for and the target of political struggles between elites and by citizens. Such localization of political life in Iran is intertwined with repoliticization of the Iranian society through the Green Movement of 2009-10, increased intergovernmental conflicts, and the opening of the scope of urban activism and social diversification of its committed actors.

• GULCIN LELANDAIS Contentious Politics under Neoliberal Urbanism in Turkey: Thoughts from the Gezi Park Uprisings and Neighborhood Resistances in Metropolitan Cities

> During AKP’s rule, cities in Turkey have become central to the continued reproduction of neoliberalism itself, constituting increasingly important geographic targets and laboratories for a variety of neoliberal policy experiments aimed at increasing the value of land. In this neoliberal regime, urban transformation is considered a main tool to generate land rent, to commodify more spaces, and to redesign city space.
In an urban space based on market value of place and without a participative process taking into account the needs and desires of inhabitants, the neighborhood becomes the place where many social groups (minorities, political and/or religious groups, etc.) create enclaves wherein their identities are recognized without repression. These places enhance the development of a relatively shared identity, connected with the neighborhood, inside the community. State efforts to renew such areas constitute a direct threat to the community’s shared identity and lifestyle, thereby triggering resistance in order to protect the neighborhood.
Additionally, protests included many claims dealing with urbanization policies and democratic participation all the way to opposition against autocratic tendencies in government. But analyzing these protests merely as the consequence of various frustrations and of consolidating authoritarianism in Turkish society cannot explain the complete picture of protests in the last decade in Turkey. The distinctive role of the urban question becomes dramatically important under the Party of Justice and Development’s (AKP) rule, and this question will be one of the major motivations of the Gezi Park uprisings. Based on some field study from Istanbul and Ankara, this paper will first examine the neoliberal urbanization of Turkey during the last decade and its relationship with different forms of urban social movements. It will then focus on specific examples like the Gezi Park uprisings and the Sulukule and Dikmen Valley Resistances. Finally, I will argue that these protests emerge from a struggle of perception and appropriation of space, understood in a Lefebvrian sense, between different actors in Turkey, in the context of a state-led neoliberal urbanization.

• KEISHA-KHAN Y. PERRY  Evictions and Convictions: State Violence and Black Dispossession in the Americas

> Black dispossession (loss of land/territorial rights, housing evictions, and gentrification) represents a form of anti-black violence devastating black communities throughout the Americas. Yet our conversations of anti-black violence tend to emphasize the disproportionate impact of violent policing on Black men. Drawing from examples in Brazil, Jamaica, and the United States, I show how latent and subtle forms of aggression buttress the unequal social order, and how Black women are key political protagonists in the fight against this aggression. The backbone of grassroots mobilization, Black women recognize that there is a direct relationship between the structural racism that Black people experience and the physical violence of the state. The police work in tandem with the destruction of Black urban environments, and racial terror and mass incarceration work in tandem with mass evictions and gentrification. Consequently, Black women are the momentum behind the movement against anti-Black racism transnationally, particularly the fight against displacement and the fight for land and housing rights. I argue that black urban spaces are racialized gendered terrains of domination in which black and black women’s politics are deeply connected to resistance against geographic domination as practiced in forced removal and dispossession.

• RICHARD PITHOUSE A Decade of Struggle in Durban

>This contribution will offer some insights drawn from just over a decade of struggle – primarily but not exclusively around urban land – by Abahlali baseMjondolo in Durban. It outlines the broad arc of that struggle, the changing relationships with the state and other actors, as well as the changes in the movement’s ideas and practices. The presentation will note that in South Africa, as elsewhere, the elite public sphere is overwhelmingly a site of intra-elite contestation. Political ideas and practices in the sphere of what is variously termed as subaltern, plebeian, or popular politics, or the politics of the common people, are often apprehended through what Frantz Fanon called the a priori. The result is that, to borrow from Fanon, this politics “spontaneously, by the very fact of appearing in the scene, enters into a pre-existing framework”. In that framework political initiative undertaken from within the zones of exclusion, subordination and dishonor is often misread via what E.P. Thompson called the “spasmodic view” of popular politics, as an instance of what Lewis Gordon, riffing off Fanon, calls “illicit appearance” or via the imposition of what Cedric Robinson described as “the casual application of preformed categories” onto actually existing forms of organization and mobilization. This contribution will seek, in particular, to offer some illumination of the kinds of popular political ideas and practices that are often occluded in elite publics.

• DENNIS RODGERS Gangsters as Infrastructure: Criminal Planning in the Age of Urban Anti-politics

> This presentation takes as its starting point the variable relationship between gangs and the urban contexts within which they emerge, focusing in particular on the socio-spatial consequences of the former for the latter, especially when these are characterized by high levels of inequality and social segregation. Drawing on two decades of ongoing longitudinal ethnographic research in Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, it explores the role that gangs can play in materially and socially constituting the city as forms of “criminal planning” (Roller, 2016), whether actively as forms of both individual and collective infrastructure, or more passively as symbolic reference points justifying iniquitous forms of top-down planning. In doing so, it highlights both the situational limits and possibilities of gangs as collective political actors in an epoch where cities can increasingly be said to be characterized as fundamentally “anti-political”.

• ANANYA ROY The City as Sanctuary: The Politics of Space and Scale in the Age of Trumpism

> The phenomenon of Trumpism is not unique to the United States. If understood as an articulation of neoliberalism with xenophobia, its presence is evident in many world regions. Nor is Trumpism wholly new. Its roots lie in the long-standing project of white supremacy, one that has thrived and matured in American soil through right-wing mobilization. In this talk, I analyze the role of the city in the age of Trumpism. In particular, I interrogate the concept of the city as sanctuary and its implications for the rescaling of state power. By paying attention to the specific bodies and identities that are protected in sanctuary cities and those that are ignored, even banished, I indicate the limits of liberal inclusion. In keeping with the nascent resistance movements in the United States, I also ask whether the historical conjuncture of Trumpism might be propitious for a new politics of cityness, one that exceeds the polite boundaries of liberalism. Finally, I investigate the role of the professions, specifically planning and architecture, in the context of spaces and scales of resistance. Will these disciplines and professions constitute an infrastructure of assent or will they forge “rogue” practices of expertise in the face of authoritarian power?

• SAMI ZEMNI Urban Contentious Politics and the Tunisian Revolution: Some Reflections on the Relational Nature of the Urban

>This presentation engages in the debate on urban contentious politics by returning to the Tunisian revolution. In the presentation, I will briefly chart movements provoked by neoliberal restructurings and show how these ultimately came together to form a mass movement demanding radical political change by describing the socio-spatial roots of the Tunisian revolution. Although the Tunisian revolution started in rural environments, I focus more specifically on the role of urban social movements in the uprising to link questions of urbanism to what were clearly national revolts. I also consider the resulting uneven development and the changing relations between the state and the different social classes. This enables me to reflect on the politicization of the city with the aim of opening up new opportunities for engaging with a more comparative and cosmopolitan theory about cities around the world. This analysis will include a reflection on the nature of ‘the urban’, the emerging sites of resistance that thrive within it, and the relational aspects (between city and rural hinterland, between city and the transnational,…) that structure the urban.

• YASAR ADANALI, NADINE BEKDACHE, ISIDRO LÓPEZ, NIZAR SAGHIEH Panel Discussion: Emerging Strategies and Frames across National Contexts

>This discussion panel brings together activist-researchers to speak about their ongoing engagements for more inclusive cities, discussing approaches, frames, and strategies. They weave together struggles for participatory governance, the right to housing, and the protection of the urban shared commons. Adanali will speak of the successful tenants’ rights to housing movement in Turkey through the Düzce Solidarity Housing Cooperative for Homeless and Tenant Earthquake Victims’ Hope Homes Project in Istanbul. Bekdache will speak of mapping evictions in Beirut and the ongoing struggle to maintain the right to housing at a time when rent control is being revoked. López will describe his struggle to enter and fight for the Podemos agenda in the Madrid Regional Parliament. Saghieh will speak of his struggle as part of the Legal Agenda collective and the success stories of an approach centered around strategic litigation.

• MONA FAWAZ, TOLGA ISLAM, YAHIA SHAWKAT, JAD TABET, ARAM YERETZIAN Round Table Discussion: Towards a Committed Practice

>Through most of the conference presentations, planning emerges as the “culprit”, well in line with its theorization as Planning Noir over the past decade. Moving forward, does planning need to be so? What can we learn, as planners, from social movements? What kind of practice can be informed and cast as “good planning’? What kind of professional organizations do we need to have/fight for to recover the progressive potentials of our profession?